Compressed DSD support

[bb-qq]

Since .dsf/.dff are RAW formats, these file sizes often become huge. For example, a song of 6 minutes duration with DSD256 format is about 1GB.

To reduce disk usage, audiophiles use compression using the WavPack. The WavPack is the best method to compress DSD. It achieves a 50%~60% compression ratio in my library.

I know you don't have any plans to support WavPack, but I would appreciate it if you re-consider WavPack support with this background.

To support WavPack, I guess the following works are required:

• Support reading tag for MinimServer
  • The pure java decoder example should have the metadata parser:
    https://www.wavpack.com/files/JavaWavPac...r_v1.3.zip
    
• Support wvunpack for MinimStreamer
  • WavPack has cli program to decompress files called wvunpack:
    https://www.wavpack.com/wavpack_doc.html
  • I would like to use this program to convert .wv to .dsf on the fly for native streaming(not DoPE) instead of FFmpeg because my AV receiver only supports plain dsf
  • The stream.transcode property need to accept dsf format as output
    

Thank you for the great product and for reading my comment.

[simoncn]

Thanks for this post. I understand what you want and why you want it and I am sorry that this will not be possible using MinimServer/MinimStreamer.

I suggest you investigate JRiver. I believe JRiver is able to stream DSF compressed as WavPack or stream WAV compressed as WavPack and transcoded on the fly to DSF.

[bb-qq]

Thank you for the reply. Yes, I have already tried JRiver Media Center, but my requirement was not fulfilled. I would like to share why I want to use MinimServer/MinimStreamer.

- Too heavy to transcode

I've run JMC on Synology DS918+ NAS using VM but its sound is choppy when transcoding to dsf.
wvunpack decompresses wv files at 8x speed when run directly, so I suspect JMC decodes wv files to wav once and re-encoded to DSD.
If my receiver supports DoPE, I will not encounter such a problem...

- Headless support and running natively

MinimServer can be installed using Synology Package Center and it can be run natively. VM is not needed. This is ideal.


If you feel hard to support WavPack files, it is also ok for me if MinimServer/MinimStreamer supports transcoding compressed .dff(DST) to dsf. But I don't know the proper command-line program for converting compressed .dff to .dsf directly.

I guess Minim means minimal and you want to keep the feature set of the program simple. But I believe direct transcoding support to raw dsf helps many users using AV receivers with NAS. Thank you.

[simoncn]

MinimServer uses FFmpeg to transcode. FFmpeg has a DSF decoder, so transcoding from DSF to PCM is possible. FFmpeg doesn't have a DFF decoder or a DSF encoder, so transcoding from DFF to DSF is not possible.

[perolator]

I have the same request.
To my limited knowledge, it is possible to decode DSF files in WavPack containers using the native WavPack decoder written in Java by David Bryant (david at wavpack.com). In such cases, WavPack provides the DSF contents to the ffmpeg binary for DSF decoding. Thus, ffmpeg will decode the file as an ordinary DSF file.
The DSD contents are stored as DSF, so MinimStreamer may accept the file for transcoding to WAV in real time, or decoding it natively.
For what I read, Mr. David Bryant is very collaborative when it comes to share the knowledge for WavPack integration with other software.
It would be terrific for Minimserver to support WavPack DSF files.
Minimserver is very light, even using MinimStreamer. Adding this capability will bring more users to this already excellent platform.

[simoncn]

Thanks for this. I understand what you are proposing for how WavPack support could be added to MinimServer.

Adding support for a new file format is a considerable amount of work requiring reading the file format to extract audio data, tag information and embedded artwork. In the case of WavPack this would require reading APEv2 tags, which aren't currently supported by MinimServer.

Playing a WavPack file using transcoding to DSF in real time with a combination of the WavPack decoder and FFmpeg might be possible but would require significant changes to the trancoding pipeline in MinimStreamer. It might be difficult to make this combination work correctly for smooth playback in real time and it would be difficult or impossible to support exact real-time seeking to any point in the track, whch works for all currently supported audio formats.

All this adds up to a considerable amount of work that would be needed with possible technical issues that could only be discovered after much of the work has been done.

MinimServer supports industry standard audio formats that are widely supported by network streamers. From everything I have been able to find, WavPack has little or no support in streamer devices.

For all these reasons, I don't have any plans to add WavPack support to MinimServer/MinimStreamer.

[perolator]

(17-03-2026 09:18)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks for this. I understand what you are proposing for how WavPack support could be added to MinimServer.

Adding support for a new file format is a considerable amount of work requiring reading the file format to extract audio data, tag information and embedded artwork. In the case of WavPack this would require reading APEv2 tags, which aren't currently supported by MinimServer.

Playing a WavPack file using transcoding to DSF in real time with a combination of the WavPack decoder and FFmpeg might be possible but would require significant changes to the trancoding pipeline in MinimStreamer. It might be difficult to make this combination work correctly for smooth playback in real time and it would be difficult or impossible to support exact real-time seeking to any point in the track, whch works for all currently supported audio formats.

All this adds up to a considerable amount of work that would be needed with possible technical issues that could only be discovered after much of the work has been done.

MinimServer supports industry standard audio formats that are widely supported by network streamers. From everything I have been able to find, WavPack has little or no support in streamer devices.

For all these reasons, I don't have any plans to add WavPack support to MinimServer/MinimStreamer.

I understand.
I’m also a developer, and I know that stability should not be traded for features.
Thank you for your kind reply.

[simoncn]

Thank you for this reply and for your understanding.